Sebene Selassie & Pamela Paul With Jessi Hempel: A Conversation

Jessi Hempel is the host of the podcast Hello Monday and a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. For nearly two decades, she has been writing and editing features and cover stories about work, life, and meaning in the digital age. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. In The Family Outing: A Memoir (HarperOne), Hempel writes about growing up in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. The reality was far different. Her father was constantly away from home traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Hempel and her siblings struggled to make sense of their family, world, changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. Each, in their way, was hiding their true self from the world. By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender, and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with an alleged serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning. It led them to question their place in the world in new and liberating ways.

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and also oversees book coverage at the Times, where she hosts the weekly Book Review podcast. She is also an author whose books include My Life with Bob; How to Raise a Reader; By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony; and Rectangle Time, a book for children. Before joining The New York Times, she was a contributor to Time and The Economist, and her work appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Vogue. In her most recent book, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet (Crown Publishing Group), Paul’s musings turn to modern life and its absolute entrenchment in the digital space. Today we exist, for the most part, in the filtered and isolated corners of the internet – a place that has all at once become our local library, office, bar, movie theater, and concert hall. While the internet has put an entire world at our fingertips, it has also taken away many of the fundamental human experiences that sustain us.

Sebene Selassie is a teacher and author who guides people to remember and trust the mystery and power of belonging. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Washington, D.C., she is trained as a meditation teacher, an integral coach, and practitioner of Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (IFOT). We are not separate from each other, but we don’t always believe it and we certainly don’t always practice it. In Selassie’s debut work You Belong: A Call for Connection (HarperOne), she argues that accepting our belonging is the key to facing the many challenges currently impacting our world. Using ancient philosophy, multidisciplinary research, exquisite storytelling, and razor-sharp wit, she leads us in an exploration of all the ways we separate (and thus, suffer) and offers a map back to belonging. To belong, she says, is to experience joy in any moment: to feel pleasure, dance in public, accept death, forgive what seems unforgivable, and extend kindness to yourself and others. To belong is also to acknowledge injustice, reckon with history, and face our own shadows. Full of revelations and practical advice, You Belong makes a winning case for resisting the forces that demand separation and reclaiming the connection – and belonging – that have been ours all along.